Infant dies of listeria after mother consumes raw milk during pregnancy

[thewayne]

Sigh. And it happened in my state of New Mexico.

Raw milk is something that Robert FUCKING Kennedy Junior Mint advocates for, claiming it's healthy. It is decidedly not. It's swarming with pathogens that can be quite deadly which is why the death rate went down after pasteurization became a dairy industry standard practice.

So all together now: Hey, Hey, RFK: how many kids have you killed today!

The medical examiner can't directly tie the infant's death to the raw milk consumption of the mother except noting there's not many other places the child could have contracted listeria from.


What's worse, I just read today that women are now training for pregnancy like they train for doing a triathlon. Including the consumption of raw milk. Thus I expect this is just the first such report that we'll be seeing like this.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/02/newborns-death-spurs-raw-milk-warning-in-new-mexico/

Comments

[thewayne]

I read a reply, I think on Ars Technica, from someone who lived on a milk farm.  From what he described, there's absolutely no way you can keep the cow's udders and teats clean in even a moderately-sized operation, or even the milking equipment sterile, so they basically don't try - they don't have the man-power, if they did the price of milk would soar.  They do hose out the milk house between milkings.  Their grass diet makes their feces very wet, and they still dump while being milked, which is another problem with trying to keep the milking equipment sterile.  They simply can't do it.  Each milking station has a paper filter, which is replaced between the two daily milking sessions, but not between cows.  It's an extremely filthy operation.  Pasteurization is very important, and the only way I'll consume it since I'm immune-compromised.

[arlie]

Yeesh! It's even worse than I realized.

[thewayne]

Milk production is pretty horrible.  And what I wrote is very tamed down from what I read!